Columns

An open letter to Indian Land Middle School administration and teachers:
After 12 years in Charlotte, my family finally decided to move “south of the border” last year. Our main priority was finding a home that would position our girls for the perfect middle and future high schools.

Our world has seen the most dramatic changes in the past 100 years. We have gone from the horse and buggy to a vehicle wandering the surface of Mars.
I would also add social advancements to the long list of technological ones, but we still have certain areas where improvement must happen.
Specifically, I refer to language.

After World War II, a fierce but civil rivalry developed between Birmingham and Atlanta as to which would become the unofficial “Capital of the South.”
Founded in 1871, Birmingham was a coal and steel town with much of the ownership of the principal industries being in Pittsburgh and other Northern cities. The city’s symbol was and is a large statue of Vulcan, the Roman god of fire and the forge. In 1950, the city’s population was 326,000.

Editor’s note: Breanna Pittman, a senior at Andrew Jackson High School, is graduating with the highest GPA in the Lancaster County School District. Here are excerpts from her speech at the county’s Celebration of Excellence this month.

Tonight I want to talk about a topic that many people overlook and others just choose to ignore – failure.
Failure is inevitable. It will happen at least once in every person’s life. Most of the time you don’t even see it coming, and it hits you like a freight train.

The Lancaster County Youth Leadership program graduated 38 students this month. The program, a collaboration between the Lancaster County Chamber of Commerce and the Lancaster County School District, is designed to teach leadership skills and raise awareness of job opportunities and community challenges in Lancaster County, in hopes that these students will return to Lancaster after graduating from college to live and work.

I am writing in response Sunday’s column by Athena Redmond, headlined “I’m no fan of the Confederate flag, but I offer this narrow defense of it.”
One thing about the Confederate flag – you are either for it or against it. You can’t be both. Don’t be a fence swinger. Either be on the left or the right side of anything, but not in the middle.

It’s been a long time coming, but citizens of South Carolina will soon have faster and cheaper access to public documents.
For seven years, the legislature has for one reason or another not passed a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) reform bill. They did so on the last day of the session this year, and it offers some real improvements in our state’s open-government law.

May 4 marked Gov. Henry McMaster’s 100th day in office. Since there was such a flurry of reporting about President Trump’s first 100 days, it seems appropriate to look at what McMaster has achieved in his first 100 days.
Below is a simple recounting of the facts as reported by the state’s media. I then offer my opinion, and I leave it to you to decide for yourself if McMaster, so far, has succeeded or failed.

An article in Friday’s paper detailed a minor controversy this week in Lancaster.
The county removed two small Confederate battle flags from a wreath laid at the Confederate Soldiers’ Monument in front of the historic courthouse. And the people who put the wreath there in honor of Confederate Memorial Day were unhappy about that.